Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

The final editorial checks for this issue took place just as Florida's Attorney General, James Uthmeier, posted a video on X announcing plans to create ‘Alligator Alcatraz’: a temporary detention centre situated on an abandoned airstrip in the middle of the Everglades that could house up to one thousand ‘criminal aliens’. Against a video montage of the area, action music playing in the background, he declares: ‘You don't need to invest that much in the perimeter. People get out and there's not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide’.

This special issue brings plant studies into conversation with anthropological discussions of place-making and emplacement, drawing particular attention to the analytical ambit of human–plant intimacies. Plant intimacies—ways of carefully attending to, affecting, and being affected by plants—are ubiquitous and central to many human lives but remain underexamined in anthropological conversations on home and place-making. Closely inquiring into these relationships allows for theorising on how people, plants, homes, and places become entangled in efforts to claim places and create liveable worlds. Articles in this issue draw attention to the queer, affective, embodied potentials of making homes and places with plants in the face of drastic displacements that affect contemporary human and plant life-worlds.

This article draws upon my research with Turkish and Kurdish migrants on their relationships with the plants they grow in Germany. Relationships with plants have two affordances in this context. Firstly, intimate care relationships with plants facilitate the emplacement of both the plants and the humans. Secondly, plants lend people metaphors to reflect upon their migrant conditions. Under the circumstances of climactic and societal differences, xenophobia, and precarity, plants and people grow closer and survive together, while the human participants of these relationships draw reciprocal parallels between themselves and their plant companions. These parallels—anthropomorphisms and phytomorphisms—unfold as modalities of intimacy within the lives of the migrants.

This article discusses the roles of houseplants in making home and building worlds. It draws on empirical data gathered by Care for Plants; a project started during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK to research why people embraced (or intensified) their care-work with plants. Starting from the observation that houseplants had taken a pivotal role in re-making everyday life under conditions of restricted mobility, reduced sociality, and increased fear for the future, this article traces the disruptive potentials of plant–people homemaking practices at a time of intensified crisis. As such, it explores the meanings of multispecies intimacy, the role of vulnerability to enable transformative plant–people relationships, and the political potentials for these domestic partnerships to shape more-than-human encounters.

This article explores a case study from ethnographic research with seed-savers and seed activists in London. It discusses the experiences and reflections of Babu Roy, a working-class man of Indian and Kenyan heritage and veteran anti-racist activist, on the intimate relations between people and plants and how these relations can grow community amongst marginalised and racialised people in the UK's ‘hostile environment’ towards immigrants (see El-Enany 2020; Goodfellow 2019; Griffiths and Yeo 2021). The hostile environment reproduces racialised categorisations of ‘migrants’ and ‘citizens’ and represents an intensified incursion into social reproduction and kinship in which ‘problems’ of migration are located, and policed, within the racialised migrant family (Erel 2018). Babu's gardening practice, which includes teaching working-class and racialised children how to grow food and save seeds, is an act of resistance, a defiant attempt at care, intimacy, growth and flourishing in the face of the hostile environment.

The region of Afrin, Syria, has long been famous for its olive trees. In 2018, violent conflict displaced a large part of the Kurdish population, thus disrupting the intimate bonds that connected people and trees. Through a focus on refugees from Afrin who now live in Germany, the article traces how humans strive to reconnect with the trees they left behind through three distinct modalities, namely remembering, consuming their produce, and continuing to care through ‘remote farming’. Time impacts these shifting interspecies relations, changing the rhythms that intertwine human and arboreal biographies. As the physical separation between people and their trees continues, practices of remote care and cultivation gradually lose their significance, while consumption becomes more prominent. This may, in turn, shape potential multispecies futures.

Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili's Park of Giant Trees, on Georgia's Black Sea coast, has received more media attention for the process of its construction rather than the product. The intimate plant spectacle is mostly for Bidzina himself, the personal ‘hobby’ of a billionaire oligarch who can afford to uproot and transport the giant trees at great expense. This park appears as a spectacle of plant violence to citizens and environmental activists. The bewildered and outraged reaction to this violent process is captured in Salome Jashi's documentary film Taming the Garden (2021), which features those who sold their giant trees to Bidzina, realising afterwards how their intimacy with their trees has been destroyed, along with their shade, leaving only ambivalence and sadness. This article explores how plant intimacies can evoke ‘structures of feeling’ that can be intimate in complicated ways, some of them negative.

This afterword considers how care and creativity, alongside coercion and destruction, materialise in different ways within the plant–human intimacies and place-making practices examined in this Special Issue. It reflects on the openings that care and coercion afford for making and nurturing roots and relations otherwise, at a time when the perniciously pervasive yet always selective myth of anthropocentrism continues to undermine the grounds of existence for humans and non-humans alike. In doing so, it aims to highlight some of the many ways in which this collection offers alternative imaginaries and practices for enacting multispecies relatings that are ultimately as much about love and beauty as they are about violence and exclusion.

This commentary engages with the theoretical implications of human–plant intimacies for migration and mobility studies. Departing from anthropocentric paradigms, it draws on the special issue's ethnographic accounts to foreground the relational, affective, and political dimensions of human–plant entanglements in contexts of displacement. Plants emerge here not as passive background elements but as co-constitutive agents in processes of emplacement, memory production, and resistance. Drawing on concepts from multispecies ethnography, feminist political ecology, and affect theory, the commentary reflects on how plant care, cultivation, and loss reconfigure dominant understandings of home, movement, and belonging. In centering more-than-human agencies, it argues for a reorientation of migration studies that accounts for the material and affective infrastructures of life forged across human and vegetal worlds.

Pablo Wright, Ser-en-el-sueño: crónicas de historia y vida toba, Buenos Aires: Biblos, 270 pp., 16 pp. colour booklet, 2008

Eva Fiks, State Intimacies: Sterilization, Care and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India, New York: Berghahn Books, 242 pp., 2024